Criminal hacker who coded Mariposa botnet jailed in Slovenia

A hacker accused of masterminding one of the biggest ever botnets has been sentenced to just under 5 years in jail.

Matjaz Skorjanc was arrested in 2010 after a two-year investigation into malware that had hijacked about 12.7 million computers around the world.

The 27-year-old was found guilty of creating the Mariposa botnet software, assisting others in “wrongdoings” and money laundering…

In addition to the 58-month jail term, Skorjanc was also ordered to pay a €4,000 fine and give up a flat and car he was alleged to have bought with money he had received from a Spanish criminal syndicate.

The prosecutors in the case have said they also intended to challenge the Slovenian court’s ruling because they had wanted a tougher jail sentence of seven-and-a-half-years.

The former medical student’s ex-girlfriend Nusa Coh was also sentenced to eight months probation for money laundering…

The botnet got its name because it was created with software called ButterFly Flooder that was alleged to have been written by Skorjanc and advertised on the net as a way to “stress test” computer networks and remotely control Windows and Linux PCs.

Computers in more than 190 countries were infected by Mariposa, which spread by a variety of methods including via instant messages, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems and removable storage devices…

The scale of the problem led the FBI to team up with European law enforcement agencies, the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and other security experts to track down the perpetrators…

It’s a milestone among adults. Too many hackers still have an understanding of life and society barely beyond sophomoric. Little understanding of commerce and freedom of communication makes clowns like Skorjanc an ideal candidate for the NSA and the criminal clones aping their ideology around the world. He just happened to choose the overt variety of corruption and evil.

Nice to see something more than the slap-on-the-wrist style usually reserved for petit bourgeois anarchists and profiteers.